Bayesian inference and bounded rational decision-making require the accumulation of evidence or utility, respectively, to transform a prior belief or strategy into a posterior probability distribution over hypotheses or actions. Crucially, this process cannot be simply realized by independent integrators, since the different hypotheses and actions also compete with each other. In continuous time, this competitive integration process can be described by a special case of the replicator equation. Here we investigate simple analog electric circuits that implement the underlying differential equation under the constraint that we only permit a limited set of building blocks that we regard as biologically interpretable, such as capacitors, resistors, voltage-dependent conductances and voltage- or current-controlled current and voltage sources. The appeal of these circuits is that they intrinsically perform normalization without requiring an explicit divisive normalization. However, even in idealized simulations, we find that these circuits are very sensitive to internal noise as they accumulate error over time. We discuss in how far neural circuits could implement these operations that might provide a generic competitive principle underlying both perception and action.

A number of recent studies have investigated differences in human choice behavior depending on task framing, especially comparing economic decision-making to choice behavior in equivalent sensorimotor tasks. Here we test whether decision-making under ambiguity exhibits effects of task framing in motor vs. non-motor context. In a first experiment, we designed an experience-based urn task with varying degrees of ambiguity and an equivalent motor task where subjects chose between hitting partially occluded targets. In a second experiment, we controlled for the different stimulus design in the two tasks by introducing an urn task with bar stimuli matching those in the motor task. We found ambiguity attitudes to be mainly influenced by stimulus design. In particular, we found that the same subjects tended to be ambiguity-preferring when choosing between ambiguous bar stimuli, but ambiguity-avoiding when choosing between ambiguous urn sample stimuli. In contrast, subjects’ choice pattern was not affected by changing from a target hitting task to a non-motor context when keeping the stimulus design unchanged. In both tasks subjects’ choice behavior was continuously modulated by the degree of ambiguity. We show that this modulation of behavior can be explained by an information-theoretic model of ambiguity that generalizes Bayes-optimal decision-making by combining Bayesian inference with robust decision-making under model uncertainty. Our results demonstrate the benefits of information-theoretic models of decision-making under varying degrees of ambiguity for a given context, but also demonstrate the sensitivity of ambiguity attitudes across contexts that theoretical models struggle to explain.

We show via an equivalence of mathematical programs that a support vector (SV) algorithm can be translated into an equivalent boosting-like algorithm and vice versa. We exemplify this translation procedure for a new algorithmone-class leveragingstarting from the one-class support vector machine (1-SVM). This is a first step toward unsupervised learning in a boosting framework. Building on so-called barrier methods known from the theory of constrained optimization, it returns a function, written as a convex combination of base hypotheses, that characterizes whether a given test point is likely to have been generated from the distribution underlying the training data. Simulations on one-class classification problems demonstrate the usefulness of our approach.

Motivation: Large scale gene expression data are often analysed by clustering genes based on gene expression data alone, though a priori knowledge in the form of biological networks is available. The use of this additional information promises to improve exploratory analysis considerably.
Results: We propose constructing a distance function which combines information from expression data and biological networks. Based on this function, we compute a joint clustering of genes and vertices of the network. This general approach is elaborated for metabolic networks. We define a graph distance function on such networks and combine it with a correlation-based distance function for gene expression measurements. A hierarchical clustering and an associated statistical measure is computed to arrive at a reasonable number of clusters. Our method is validated using expression data of the yeast diauxic shift. The resulting clusters are easily interpretable in terms of the biochemical network and the gene expression data and suggest that our method is able to automatically identify processes that are relevant under the measured conditions.

The authors used a recognition memory paradigm to assess the influence of color information on visual memory for images of natural scenes. Subjects performed 5-10% better for colored than for black-and-white images independent of exposure duration. Experiment 2 indicated little influence of contrast once the images were suprathreshold, and Experiment 3 revealed that performance worsened when images were presented in color and tested in black and white, or vice versa, leading to the conclusion that the surface property color is part of the memory representation. Experiments 4 and 5 exclude the possibility that the superior recognition memory for colored images results solely from attentional factors or saliency. Finally, the recognition memory advantage disappears for falsely colored images of natural scenes: The improvement in recognition memory depends on the color congruence of presented images with learned knowledge about the color gamut found within natural scenes. The results can be accounted for within a multiple memory systems framework.

Practical experience has shown that in order to obtain the best possible performance, prior knowledge about invariances of a classification
problem at hand ought to be incorporated into the training procedure. We describe and review all known methods for doing so in support vector machines,
provide experimental results, and discuss their respective merits. One of the significant new results reported in this work is our recent achievement of the
lowest reported test error on the well-known MNIST digit recognition benchmark task, with SVM training times that are also significantly faster than
previous SVM methods.

Model selection is an important ingredient of many machine
learning algorithms, in particular when the sample size in
small, in order to strike the right trade-off between overfitting
and underfitting. Previous classical results for linear regression
are based on an asymptotic analysis. We present a new
penalization method for performing model selection for
regression that is appropriate even for small samples.
Our penalization is based on an accurate estimator of the
ratio of the expected training error and the expected
generalization error, in terms of the expected eigenvalues
of the input covariance matrix.

The detectability of contrast increments was measured as a function of the contrast of a masking or pedestal grating at a number of different spatial frequencies ranging from 2 to 16 cycles per degree of visual angle. The pedestal grating always had the same orientation, spatial frequency and phase as the signal. The shape of the contrast increment threshold versus pedestal contrast (TvC) functions depend of the performance level used to define the threshold, but when both axes are normalized by the contrast corresponding to 75% correct detection at each frequency, the (TvC) functions at a given performance level are identical. Confidence intervals on the slope of the rising part of the TvC functions are so wide that it is not possible with our data to reject Webers Law.

We introduce new concentration inequalities for functions on product spaces.
They allow to obtain a Bennett type deviation bound for suprema of
empirical processes indexed by upper bounded functions.
The result is an improvement on Rio's version \cite{Rio01b} of Talagrand's
inequality \cite{Talagrand96} for equidistributed variables.

Our goal is to understand the principles of Perception, Action and Learning in autonomous systems that successfully interact with complex environments and to use this understanding to design future systems